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Tony Pearson is a Master Inventor and Senior IT Architect for the IBM Storage product line at the
IBM Systems Client Experience Center in Tucson Arizona, and featured contributor
to IBM's developerWorks. In 2016, Tony celebrates his 30th year anniversary with IBM Storage. He is
author of the Inside System Storage series of books. This blog is for the open exchange of ideas relating to storage and storage networking hardware, software and services.
(Short URL for this blog: ibm.co/Pearson )

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Today, 13.5% of EMC's sales force is female, the company says, compared with 40% at International Business Machines Corp. and 29% at CA Inc., a big software vendor, those companies say. According to the 2000 U.S. census, about 25% of high-tech employees nationally were women.

IBM recognizes that diversity provides unique advantages in dealing with a global marketplace. Not only are women well represented on our IT sales force, they are also well represented on our board of directors, our Worldwide Management Committee, and our executive team overall, as well as in technical positions such as IBM Fellows, Distinguished Engineers, members of the IBM Academy of Technology. Working Mother magazine has rated IBM one of the top 10 "Best Companies" for women to work for in each of the 18 years that it has published this list.

In 2006, 51 camps called EXITE (Exploring Interests in Technology and Engineering) were held worldwide in 33 countries. The hope is to get young girls to pursue college degrees in computer science, math and engineering, so that they can then help fill the shortage of technical resources in IT.

So, if you are a women discouraged at your current place of employment, and are looking for exciting new opportunities in IT, come check out working for IBM![Read More]

If you are ever down in Sao Paulo, Brazil, may I suggest not drinking "American amounts" of their "Brazilian Coffee". The coffee here is "robust", to say the least.

Yesterday, my blog focused on IBM iSCSI offerings that were announced in August.Also announced earlier this month, the Integrated Removable Media Manager (IRMM) on System zhas been years in the making.IRMM is a new robust systems management product for Linux® on IBM System z™ that manages open system media in heterogeneous distributed environments and virtualizes physical tape libraries. IRMM combines the capacity of multiple heterogeneous libraries into a single reservoir of tape storage that can be managed from a central point.By providing an integrated solution with the opportunity for both mainframe z/OS DFSMSrmm and distributed Tivoli® Storage Manager™ environments to be managed by IRMM, System z can now be a hub for the management of removable media.

The people who thought the "Mainframe is obsolete", and those that thought "Tape is dead", are both proven wrong again with this announcement. People are looking to deploy robust tape automation for backup and archive, and this convergence with mainframe makes perfect sense by providing business value that extends to other distributed systems.

The proof-of-concept that IBM Haifa research center developed back in 1998 became what we now call the iSCSI protocol.The book iSCSI: The Universal Storage Connection introduces the history as follows:

In the fall of 1999 IBM and Cisco met to discuss the possibility of combining their SCSI-over-TCP/IP efforts. After Cisco saw IBM's demonstration of SCSI over TCP/IP, the two companies agreed to develop a proposal that would be taken to the IETF for standardization.

There are three ways to introduce iSCSI into your data center:

Through a gateway, like the IBM System Storage N series gateway, that allows iSCSI-based servers connect to FC-based storage devices

Through a SAN switch or director, a FC-based server can access iSCSI-based storage, an iSCSI-based server accessing FC-based storage, or even iSCSI-based servers attaching to iSCSI-based storage.

Directly through the storage controller.

IBM has been delivering the first method with its successful IBM System Storage N series gateway products, buttoday we have announced additional support for the second and third methods.Here's a quick recap.

New SAN director blades

Supporting the second method, IBM TotalStorage SAN256B Director is enhanced to deliver iSCSI functionality with a new M48 iSCSI Blade, which includes 16 ports (8 Fibre Channel ports; and 8 Ethernet ports for iSCSI connectivity). We also announced a new Fibre Channel M48 Blade which provides 10 Gbps Fibre Channel Inter Switch Link (ISL) connectivity between SAN256B Directors.

With support for Boot-over-iSCSI, diskless rack-optimized and blade servers can boot Windows or Linux over Ethernet,eliminating the management hassles with internal disk.

All of this is part of IBM's overall push into the Small and Medium size Business marketplace, making it easier to shop for and buy from IBM and its many IBM Business Partners, easier to deploy and install storage, and easier tomanage the storage once you have it.

Continuing this week's theme on Business Continuity, I will use this post to discuss this week'sIBM solid state disk announcement.This new offering provides a new way to separate programs from data, to help minimizedowntime and outages normally associated with disk drive failures.

Until now, the method most people used to minimize the amount of data on internalstorage was to use disk-less servers with Boot-Over-SAN, however, not all operating systems, and not all disk systems, supported this.

Windows, however, is not supported, because of the small 4GB size and USB protocol limitations. For Windows, you would add a SAS drive, you boot from this hard drive, and use the 4GB Flash drive for data only.

So what's new this time? Here's a quick recap of July 17 announcement. For the IBM BladeCenter HS21 XM blade servers, new models of internal "disk" storage:

Single drive model

A single 15.8GB solid-state disk drive, based on SATA protocol. In addition to theLinux operating systems mentioned above, the capacity and SATA protocols allowsyou to boot 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 2003 Server R2, with plans in placeto other platforms in the future, such as VMware. I am able to run my laptop Windows with only 15GB of C: drive, separating my data to a separate D: partition, so this appears to be a reasonable size.

Dual drive model

The dual drive fits in the space of a single 2.5-inch HDD drive bay.You can combine these in either RAID 0 or RAID 1 mode.

RAID 0 gives you a total of 31.6GB, but is riskier. If you lose either drive,you lose all your data. Michael Horowitz of Cnet covers the risks of RAID zerohere andhere.However, if you are just storing your operating system and application, easily re-loadable from CD or DVD in the case of loss, then perhaps that is a reasonable risk/benefit trade-off.

RAID 1 keeps the capacity at 15.8GB, but provides added protection. If you loseeither drive, the server keeps running on the surviving drive, allowing you to schedule repair actions when convenient and appropriate. This would be the configuration I would recommend for most applications.

Until recently, solid state storage was available at a price premium only. Flash prices have dropped 50% annually while capacities have doubled. This trend is expected to continue through 2009.

According to recent studies from Google and Carnegie Mellon, hard drives fail more oftenthan expected. By one account, conventional hard disk drives internal to the server account for as much as 20-50% of component replacements.IBM analysis indicates that the replacement rate of a solid state drive on a typical blade server configuration is only about 1% per year, vs. 3% or more mentionedin the these studies for traditional disk drives.

Flash drives use non-volatile memory instead of moving parts, so less likely to break down during high external environmental stress conditions, like vibration and shock, or extreme temperature ranges (-0C° to +70°C) that would make traditional hard disks prone to failure.This is especially important for our telecommunications clients, who are always looking for solutions that are NEBS Level 3 compliant.

As with any SATA drive, performance depends on workload.Solid state drives perform best as OS boot devices, taking only a few secondslonger to boot an OS than from a traditional 73GB SAS drive. Flash drives also excel in applications featuring random read workloads, such as web servers. For random and sequential write workloads, use SAS drives instead for higher levels of performance.

Part of IBM's Project Big Green, these flash drives are very energy efficient. Thanks to sophisticated power management software, the power requirement of the solid state drive can be 95 percent better than that of a traditional 73GB hard disk drive. These 15.8GB drives use only 2W per drive versus as much as 10W per 2.5” hard drive and 16W per 3.5” hard drive. The resulting power savings can be up to 1,512 watts per server rack, with 50% heat reduction.

So, even though this is not part of the System Storage product line, I am very excitedfor IBM. To find out if this will work in your environment, go to the IBM Server Provenwebsite that lists compatability with hardware, applications and middleware, or review the latest Configuration and Options Guide (COG).

It's Tuesday, which means IBM makes its announcements. We had several for the IBM System Storage product line. Here's a quick recap.

Disk Systems

The IBM System Storage DS3000 now offers DC power models.New DC powered models of the DS3200, DS3400, and EXP3000 are well suited for Telco industry environments, as theseare NEBS and ETSI compliant and are powered by an industry standard 48 volt DC power source.

Also, the IBM System Storage N series now supports750GB SATA drives available for the EXN1000 drawer.

Tape Systems

IBM Virtualization Engine TS7740now supports 3-cluster grids. Unlike 3-way replication on disk mirroring, such as IBM Metro/Global Mirror for the DS8000 that enforces a primary, secondary and tertiary copy, the grid implementation of TS7740 tape virtualization allows for any-to-any mirroring. Existing standalone TS7740 clusters can be converted to grid-enabled. A "Copy Export" feature allows virtual tapes to be exported onto physical tape. And in keeping with our theme of "enabling business flexibility", performance throughput can now be purchased in 100 MB/sec increments, up to 600 MB/sec, to match your workload bandwidth requirements.

The IBM System Storage TS1120drives installed in the IBM System Storage™ TS3400 Tape Library can now be attached to System z platforms using the IBM System Storage™ TS1120 Tape Controller. Before this, the TS3400 could only be attached to UNIX, Windows and Linux systems.

The IBM System StorageTS2230 Express is offered as an external stand-alone or rack-mountable unit. This model incorporates the new LTO IBM Ultrium 3 Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) Half-High Tape Drive, and a 3 Gbps single port SAS interface for a connection to a wide spectrum of distributed system servers that support Microsoft Windows and Linux systems.

Storage Networking

IBM has added theCisco MDS 9124 for IBM System Storageentry-level fabric switch as an Express offering and part of the IBM Express Advantage Program. Express offerings are specifically created for mid-market companies and are well suited for workgroup storage applications like e-mail serving, collaborative databases and web serving. They bring enterprise-class performance, scalability and features to small and medium-sized companies and are easy to use, highly scalable, and cost-effective.This will make it easier for IBM Business Partners to provide fabric switch connectivity for:

Backup / restore solutions with IBM System Storage™ TS3000 Tape Libraries, such as the TS3200.

Archive and Retention

Ordering large configurations of the IBM System Storage Grid Access Manager just got a lot easier.New features enable configurations greater than 500 TB to be submitted as a single order. No change in the actualproduct, just an improvement in the ordering process.

For System p and System i servers, the IBM 3996 Optical library now supports Gen 2 60GB optical cartridges. These can be read/write or WORM cartridges.

I'm off to Denver, Colorado this week. I hope it is cooler there than it is down here in Tucson, Arizona.

Yesterday, IBM announced a variety of new storage offerings. Our theme this time around was "Policies and Performance". Here's a quick recap.

N series

IBM offers new appliance and gateway models of its popular "unified storage" IBM System Storage N series disk systems.The N5300 appliance has two models. A10 for the single-controller, and A20 for the dual-controller model. The N5600 gateway also has two models. G10 for the single-controller, and G20 for the dual-controller model.A new EXN4000 disk expansion drawer is 3U high, and can hold up to 14 disks. It can support 1Gbps, 2Gpbs and 4Gpbs speeds.In addition to all this new "performance", we offer a new "policy" called the Advanced Single Instance Storage feature for the N5000 and N7000 series, which provides de-duplication at the block level. This can be particularly useful if you are using your N series for e-mail, document publishing, databases, backups or archives.

SAN Volume Controller

A technology refresh with the new 8G4 model. Like its predecessor, the 8F4, this new model has 8GB of cache per node, and is fitted with 4Gpbs SAN attachment ports. The difference is that the 8G4 is based on our successfulIBM System x3550 server.This baby screams, so I look forward to seeing the updated SPC-1 and SPC-2 performance benchmark ratings.The new SVC 4.2 software provides additional authentication policies for more granular administration support, andmulti-destination FlashCopy (one source copied to up to 16 destination copies at the same time).

DS8000 Scalability

The DS8000 series now supports having third and fourth expansion frames. This was actually already available via RPQ, but now it can be directly ordered.This means that you can now hold up to half a Petabyte in a single disk system.

The IBM System Storage DCS9550 Storage System comes in a 4U controller and 3U disk expansion drawers. It is designed for High Performance Computing (HPC) such as genome medical research, government research and rich media applications.

Our clients tell us they need performance to meet their dynamic business demands, and policies to help them manage the ever growing size of their storage infrastructure. We listened!

IBM had some big announcements today. The theme for today's announcement was "Protected Information", as there are many reasons to protect your most strategic asset, your information. Let's do a quick run-down of a few of them.

IBM LTO generation 4

LTO 4 provides encryption at the drive level, and supports WORM cartridges similar to LTO 3. It continues the LTO consortium's strategy for higher capacity and faster performance. If you have LTO 1 or LTO 2, now is a good time to consider upgrading your tape technology. The combination of encryption and WORM protects your information against unauthorized access, and unethical tampering of the data. The support is from our largest automated tapelibrary (TS3500),to our smallest drives.

TS7520 Virtualization Engine

The TS7520replaces the TS7510, providing enhanced Virtual Tape Library (VTL) capability. When you hear "storage virtualization" you often think disk, but IBM invented "tape storage virtualization" and this product continues that leadership.

Support for Half-high LTO 3 drives

The TS3100 and TS3200 now support half-high LTO 3 drives, which means you can have twice the number of drives in each unit. LTO 4 drives can read and write to LTO 3 media, so this provides additional investment protection.

IBM System Storage DR550 File System Gateway

This new offering provides much-needed CIFS and NFS access to the DR550, the worlds most flexible compliance-and-retention storage available. Already there is a large body of ISVs that support the DR550 today, and with this new gateway, the list is even longer. The DR550 provides encryption for both disk and tape data, as well as policy-based non-erasable, non-rewriteable enforcement, designed for compliance with government regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley Act, HIPAA, and many others.

IBM System Storage SAN32B-3 switch

This is the first major deliverable from Brocade since their acquisition of McDATA. A powerful switch packs 4 Gbps support in a small 1U form factor. Start with 16 ports, then add in increments of 8 ports to a maximum of 32 ports.

I've provided all the links, so that you can delve deeply into all the data sheets.

In case you haven't noticed, IBM System Storage makes most of their announcements on Tuesdays. IBM announced a lot today, so here is a quick run-down.

Cisco storage networking products

IBM continues to resell Cisco switches and directors, but now can offer these with a 1-year IBM warranty.

The entry-level Cisco 9124offers 8 to 24 ports. For IBM BladeCenter, IBM now offers the Cisco10-port and 20-port modules that slide into the back of the chassis, and are functionally equivalent to the 9124.The original BladeCenter came with a 16-port module with 14 internal, but only 2 external, which severely hamperedbandwidth connectivity to external storage. These new modules provide more external ports to relieve that constraint.

The midrange Cisco9200switches have two models, both with 16 fixed ports, with the option for a blade that can provide 12, 24 or 48 additional ports. The 9216A has 16 FCP ports, and the 9216i has 14 FCP ports, and 2 GbE ports to act as a router, such as toconnect to a remote location for business continuity using Metro Mirror or Global Mirror.

The new TS3400library is a small entry-level size library, supporting the enterprise-class TS1120 drive, providing interoperabilitywith the larger tape libraries, with all the support for tape encryption.

In addition to Linux, Unix, and WIndows, the TS1120 can now be connected to System i servers. In the past, the only IBMtape available to System i were the LTO models. There are a lot of businesses that need to comply with government regulations that are looking for tape encryption, and now IBM has made it accessible to more clients.

300GB drives at 15K RPM

The DS8000 can now support new drives with 300GB capacity at 15,000 RPM (15K). These can be up to 30 percent faster than the 10,000 RPM drives for typical workloads.

IBM continues its market leadership with these new set of features and offerings!

The DS3200 is a 2U high, 12 drive system that attaches to servers via 3Gbps Serial Attach (SAS) interface.You can expand this to 48 drives by added EXP3000 expansion units. Here are theDS3200 specifications.

DS3400

The DS3400 is a 2U high, 12 drive system that attaches to servers via 4Gbps Fibre Channel (FC) interface.You can expand this to 48 drives by added EXP3000 expansion units. Here are the DS3400 specifications.

EXP3000

The EXP3000 is a 2U high, 12 drive expansion drawer. It was announced back in August 2006, but is part of theoverall DS3000 series. It can be used directly with servers, but is also designed to be attached to the back of the DS3200 or DS3400 to increase capacity.Here are the EXP3000 specifications.

With this announcement, IBM provides entry-level storage at the "less-than-$5000" price point, withsupport for intermix of 10K and 15K RPM drives, and scalable up to 14.4 TB capacity.This would be ideal storage for HP, Dell, IBM System x and BladeCenter servers.

An astute reader brought this to my attention. The newest addition to our "IBM Express Portfolio"set of SMB-oriented offerings is the new TS3100 tape library. This has one LTO Gen 3 drive and up to 22 cartridges, which can be a mix of WORM and rewriteable cartridges,beautifully packaged in a small 2U high (3.5 inch) rack-mountable chassis. Each cartridge can hold up to 800GB uncompressed, or 1.6TB with typical 2-to-1 compression.

This tape library would be a great complement to TSM Express for backup, and to theDR550 Express for archive and compliance storage.

And now, for a limited time, there is a $1500 rebate, check website for details.

Yesterday (September 7, 2006) the Eclipse Foundation announced that it has approved the creation of the Aperi Storage Management Framework Project.

There's been a lot of confusion out there about Aperi, so I thought I would post some facts and opinions about this exciting new project. A few years ago, I was thelead architect for IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center, IBM's infrastructure management product that helped launch the creation of Aperi.

From the latin word for "open", Aperi is an open source project that aims to simplify the management of storage environments, using the Storage Management Initiative - Specification (SMI-S) open standardto promote interoperability and eliminate complexity in today’s storage environments.

Aperi should provide immediate value upon install with basic storage management capabilities, rather than just simply a collection of components that require costly integration. We've discussed requirements for functions such as:

Resource discovery, monitoring, and reporting

Fabric Topology mapping

Event management

Disk / Tape management

Device configuration & LUN assignment

SAN fabric management

Basic asset management

User Interface

The big confusion most people have is Aperi's relation to SMI-S and the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA)open standards group. The best way to explain this is to go backto your High School SAT college-entrance exams. Remember questions like this?

It is often the case that the folks writing the code are different than the folks defining the standards. This is the case between the members of Aperi writing code, and the members of the SNIA writing standards. IBM happens tohave employees writing Aperi code, and other employees helping define SMI-S standards.What can I say, IBM is a big company and a leader in many areas.

A good analogyis how the Apache community has developed an awesome web server, and the Firefox Mozillacommunity have developed an awesome web browser, both of which are implementations of the HTTP/HTML standards adopted by the World Wide Web Consortium. Apache and Firefoxcompete with proprietary implementations, such as Microsoft Internet Information Services(IIS) web server and Internet Explorer web browser.

Aperi: SNIA ::Apache : World Wide Web (WWW) Consortium

With this arrangement, Aperi and the SNIA will have very complementary roles in defining and driving standards across the entire storage market. To that end, Aperi will make extensive use of the SNIA’s Technology Center and SNIA’s “plugfests” to test the interoperability of the Aperi framework with the variety of 3rd-party storage offerings available. By providing a tested implementation of SMI-S, Aperi will drive broader industry availability of SMI-S, as well as offer the many benefits of an industry-backed open source community.

Check out this vote of confidence:

"Eclipse's Aperi Project will further advance the adoption of SNIA's SMI-S, benefiting the entire storage industry and IT community. Furthermore, the SNIA and Aperi will define plans to collaborate on new storage standards, standards testing programs, and storage interoperability programs."--- Wayne M. Adams, chair, SNIA Board of directors

So, both proprietary and open source implementations have their place in the world.Proprietary products are needed for advanced, unique value-add, and opensource projects are for basic support focused on interoperability and flexibility.These can be combined, for example, proprietary "plug-ins" built on an open source base. The more choices the client has, the better.

Storage vendors benefit too. Vendors are tired of being in the "Y.A.C." business, building "Yet Another Configurator" for each new device developed, with basic functionsto carve LUNs, read performance stats, and so on. By shipping Aperi instead, storagevendors like IBM can invest their development dollars in real innovations, things thatmatter for the customer.

For those who missed it, IBM announced last Tuesday encryption capability for the TS1120 drive, our enterprise tape drive that read and write 3592 cartridges. Do you need special cartridges for this? No! Use the sames ones you have already been using!